How to automatically unescape the escape characters in a string

Question

I am receiving the data from the service with the escape sequence characters...I have managed to elemenate them by this code

results=results.replace("\\\"", "\"");
if(results.startsWith("\"")) {
    results=results.substring(1,results.length());
}
if(results.endsWith("\"")) {
    results=results.substring(0,results.length()-1); 
}

It works fine but for some strings it throws exception while creating json object...How do I automatically unescape the escape characters in the result, I have searched for answers but many of them saying to use a third party library...what is the best I can achieve this.

score 5 · Accepted Answer · answered Jan 31 '13 at 11:33

5

I think Apache Commons work pretty good. It has StringEscapeUtils class with bunch of different static methods for escaping and unescaping strings, so i think you should check it.

Good luck!

answered Jan 31 '13 at 11:33

Evos

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Hi @Evos Thanks for the suggestion, I have found about StringEscapeUtils in http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3537706/howto-unescape-a-java-string-literal-in-java but I would like to know ,is there any specific implementation provided by android sdk – Pragnani Jan 31 '13 at 11:37
1

@Pragnani i'm not 100% sure, but i haven't found one for my project, so i suppose this libarary is one of the best options to do that with a third party library. – Evos Jan 31 '13 at 11:41
I will wait for some more answers before accepting yours...Thank you @Evos – Pragnani Jan 31 '13 at 11:43
Hi @Evos I have added external jar commons-lang3-3.1 to my project and I have called like this String results=StringEscapeUtils.escapeJava(jsondata); but it throws NoClassDefFound Error, what is wrong..? – Pragnani Jan 31 '13 at 12:16
@Pragnani i don't know actually:), try to move jar to `libs` folder (if you are using Eclipse), check that you add it to buildpath via ProjectProperties and execute Clean/Build command. – Evos Jan 31 '13 at 12:20

score -1 · Answer 2 · answered Jan 31 '13 at 11:40

place this part of code below the parsing Array

                      // to remove all <P> </p> and <br /> and replace with ""
                     content = content.replace("<br />", "");
                     content = content.replace("<p>", "");
                     content = content.replace("</p>", "");

here for me content is object, replace according to ur necessary in the place of "content".

How to automatically unescape the escape characters in a string

2 Answers2